Should we have a 5-15 minute delay to reduce the risk of landgrabs due to mistakes

If Real life land was sold like it is on SL with landbots, I can only imagine the uproar and lawyers involved.

The process just doesn't work and there are many mistakes. The system is broke.

As far as I can tell no landbot owners have posted to this thread.



Dunno about anyone else but it takes me 4-5 seconds to buy a parcel *after it first appears in search*. Hardly the "speed of light" or whatever.

As for the poll, I'm in favour, but it's basically pointless. It won't help in more than a few percent of cases.

The seller clicking a confirm dialog is a pretty scary proposal. If implemented incorrectly it could result in the buyer falling into a situation where they don't have the money and they don't have the land either. I'd guess most land sells while the seller is offline (since most people are offline most of the time). I'm not sure I can think of a way to implement this idea fairly for the buyer and seller.

The real solution in my opinion is a public auction over a user definable time with reserve prices. But this would so radically change SecondLife I'm not sure LL have the nuts to implement it.

Meaning, "I've never had a problem therefore no-one else has ever had a problem".

They won't. They would have to justify their actions, and to put it simply, they can't. Period.

It's not even "good business" and an eye for a bargain to develop and resell to make a profit. It's just parasitic leeching, plain and simple, and often feeding off of other people's simple mistakes.

Broccoli

A few here are known to be owners or alts of landbot owners, some have even admited owning landbots in other threads, there could be 100's of people running any number of landbots each.

Confirming is only a scary proposal for those who are making money from others mistakes, crap thay may have to even start earning their money somehow rather than just waiting for the atm to spit it out.

I know people have the problem. But it's their problem, not Second Life's. Second Life didn't make them not read carefully the amount they were placing in the sell window. Second Life didn't make them click "Sell" without verifying they were selling it right.

They did. Their mistake. For once, it's not the programs fault.

The proposed delay is between the land being set for sale and appearing in the land search. As i don't think land set for sale to a specific person lists for sale in search, so the delay wouldn't be applicable there.

Matthew

Well in RL there's a certain amount of handholding and laws to go through when delving into real estate. However Second Life don't make people aware of land bots, nowhere is someone warned that "Although you can't see anyone else near this land, a bot can buy this land in seconds".

You know when people are transferring land that is deeded to a group and then back to themselves, the first time you do this, you should be aware of land bots, but unless you come to the forums, you're not going to know about them.

Just to clarify - the proposed five minute delay is between the land being set for sale and the land being listed in the land search.

This minor delay has no impact on landbots or land dealers.

This minor delay will not prevent 100% of mistakes when selling land.

This minor delay does not prohibit or prevent landbots or other land deals.

It does however provide a slight breathing space in which mistakes could be corrected. My personal view is that people should be allowed to correct mistakes, and this delay allows that, rather than punish people immediately they make one.

Luckily only 20% seem to be less forgiving than that

This is now on jira - https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-376

If you are one of the 80% who believe this would help, please vote there.

Matthew

I do agree on this point.

There needs to be more awareness raised in-world about landbots. What they can do, how fast they can do it, what to do to avoid being taken by them. But I don't agree with the delay.

In fact, I think the real jira, and potentially one that might actually get passed, is that they add information regarding the Landbots to the in-world help section, and potentially to the land sell/purchase windows.

I think this delay would hardly ever be used for correcting mistakes. What it will do though is allow people to transfer land by setting it for sale to anyone for L$1 and get away with it more of the time.

That seems like a good thing. You're still running around patching holes instead of revamping the whole system though. There's no way to remove all human error even if you replace it with an automated auctioning system. It doesn't hurt to try.

Personally I'd love to see people make less mistakes because every time it happens I lose money and waste time. Perhaps we need a poll, "Have you lost money to people selling their land for the wrong price?" Neither sellers nor buyers need the hassle of trying to understand some 12 year old Portuguese girl who sold her land by mistake and then cancelled her premium account.

I agree - but that is a sizeable chunk of the current "landbot stole by land" complaints!

However, I always check in About Land after setting the sale and I suspect others do (or would have done if a landbot hadn't spotted the error first), so I think it will capture a few other cases too.



Revamping the whole system is a lot of work and will take a time (and careful thought so not to be disruptive). It doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. However, here we have a quick interim fix which isn't disruptive (if the time delay is short and predictable, if you really wish to check your advert in the sales search you know exactly how long to wait before you check it) IMHO, and which should be fairly easy and quick to implement but whilst not totally eradicating the problem, would have a significant impact on it.

Matthew

Reading through the responses here--no comments on the jira yet--I'm having a tough time finding a coherent argument *not* to do this. Here are the arguments that seem to have been raised:

1. It doesn't do enough.
2. It prevents people who make this mistake from getting what they deserve.

As for #1, I really like the alternative suggestion that instead of the current Sell To Anyone option, only a time-limited auction is available. If the seller wants to set a minimum price, s/he bids that at auction. Otherwise, the market reigns, which seems kinda the point. And the Sell To Specific Person option remains. The only downside I see is a fairly significant amount of development--with every opportunity for bugs to creep in.

But the stop-gap proposed by the approach seems dramatically simpler and quicker for developers to implement correctly, and will deal with the most heartbreaking instances of the problem.

Which brings up #2. Do we really think people who make this mistake are justly punished by the landbots? Given the extremely limited internationalization of the viewer, for example, how punitive should we be if our hypothetical "victim" isn't a native English-reader, for example? Or dyslexic? Or gets interrupted by a phone call at the wrong moment and clicks the wrong button? It's really not the objective of good UI design to cause great suffering to those who fail to RTFM.

No, it's not the program's fault, it's the fault of those who seek to exploit other people's slight carelessness for financial gain. It's not really the case that there ought to be a delay built into the system. That's just a workaround for the main problem, which is the unethical use of bots to scoop up what is not intended for them. It's the bot issue that needs to be dealt with.